RE:Is Denali’s BBB technology a competitor Denali = transferrin receptor. 'nuff said.
I think Denali is legit and it has been fantastically well promoted. They had a big win with their IPO. Good for them.
But the antibody transport platform on transferrin and not melanotransferrin as ours is.
We lost a lot of years and could have been so far ahead of these guys. There may even be an argument that had we progressed as we should have, some competing technologies may not exist at all today.
But in the end, it will be the best technology that stands the tallest. Our knowledge of xB3 indicates that it beats Denali's and Genentech's Brain Shuttle, hands down. How close Denali's platform is to Brain Shuttle is unclear to me, but the company was founded and is populated by ex-Genentech people who worked on Brain Shuttle. Yes, they can get some stuff into the brain, but far less per given dose than we can. They probably would have to use much higher doses to achieve the delivered quantities to the brain as we can. For Denali that would mean that their treatments would be more costly and more likely to be toxic than equivalent delivered doses with xB3.
Denali's small molecule programs may not be based on receptor mediated transcytosis but as I've written before, when a molecule has to be designed to both cross the BBB and to be efficacious, then it's very difficult, and often impossible, to achieve optimal performance with either function. The beauty of a universal or near-universal carrier like we hope xB3 turns out to be is that it can cross the BBB no matter what the payload is and the payload can be designed for the single purpose of treating the disease - no conflicting purposes between xB3 and the payload.
My opinion, and that of others, has been that Brain Shuttle, whether at Genentech or Denali, is not capable of the performance that xB3 can achieve.
Denali is pretty secretive. As we make some news and come to the attention of the pharmaceutical industry, it's going to be interesting to see how they respond to little old Bioasis.
jdstox